Thursday, January 23, 2014

Reactions to Wikipedia article on Software Engineering

The article on Wikipedia about software engineering seem to speak to me of one thing in general. Although people are being taught "Software Engineering", being hired as "Software Engineers", and writing books on the subject, people are still not quite sure what "Software Engineering is. Particularly, people seem to be unclear on how to separate it from Computer Science. At first glance, it seems to be some formalization or the practical application of Computer Science, but if this is the case does this mean that Computer Science is not in and of itself practically applicable? Perhaps...


And in other ways it seemed as though the article described Software Engineering as a commercialization of purely academic Computer Science.


Much of the article focused on discussing aspects of Programming that related to reusable, correct, code, such as testing, design, following standards, etc. Maybe the practices thought in Software Engineering could be summed up as teaching Computer Scientists how to not be lazy programmers? It does seem that this concept may be at the heart of the field. After all, an truly overwhelming amount of data shows how much of a negative effect that lazy and sloppy programming, testing, and documentation can have on a project, and these are areas that often even the most brilliant Computer Scientists struggle with.

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